The present invention relates to a specimen rack and a specimen carrier system in which the specimen rack holds simultaneously a single or plurality of specimen containers containing specimens, for use in a pretreatment device and an analyzing device to treat (process) or analyze specimen samples such as bloods and urines, and the specimen carrier system is furnished inside or outside an apparatus which carries the specimen rack to the pretreatment device and analyzing device.
The pretreatment device and analyzing device have been grown in size with increase of test items and the number of specimens to perform a necessary treatment given to a specimen and to analyze it automatically for the specimen analysis. Meanwhile, to make a test work more efficient, the devices have been demanded for an enhancement of reliability, high throughput and low cost. For a purpose of enhancing a treatment performance, a specimen carrier system has been developed and commercially usable with use of coupling a plurality of devices, and the specimens are then carried by straddling the devices. A specimen rack has also been developed and commercially usable to be able to carry the plural specimens simultaneously.
The specimens held in the specimen rack are carried from an input portion of the specimen carrier system to the pretreatment device and analyzing device, and carried to an unloading position of the specimen carrier system, after the necessary treatment and analysis are completed. A pipette for sucking the specimen is sometimes clogged with a coagulation in the specimen on the treatment and analysis, depending on a quantity or condition of the specimen. In addition, an abnormality sometimes occurs such that a specimen fluid volume is short for the number of test items to analyze it. When the abnormality is detected, the devices judge a specimen condition from sensor information to immediately cease the analyzing operation for an abnormal specimen and to move to the analyzing operation for the next specimen. The abnormal specimen caused by the clogging and fluid volume shortage is applied again by the pretreatment and the like, and the abnormal specimen is repeatedly subject to the analysis.
In the case of a large size device, several tens to over hundreds specimen racks are carried by a carrier device, therefore, the total number of specimens on the carrier device could be several hundreds, depending on the number of specimens held by the specimen rack. In order to automatically and accurately associate each of such a great number specimens with analysis item and progress of analysis for the specimen and result of analysis, an ID such as a barcode is not only applied to a specimen container to read it reliably, but also applied to the specimen rack, as disclosed in JP-A-2-253854. Further, as disclosed in JP-A-11-83865, as an objective to realize a self-directive carry and analysis and to improve efficiency, a technique has been devised that the specimen rack has a communication unit and a readable and writable ID tag to exchange information between the devices. In this way, a high information processing performance is required to perform testing automatically and accurately for a number of test items and for a number of specimens. Therefore, an accessorius personal computer which the devices come with is mainly used for information processing in the case of the large size system.